Most reliable motherboards

[Dan82]

Personally I never had a problem with Asus boards.

My friend wanted to build a small media pc on the cheap so I told him to go for Asrock as they seem to have good rep across forums. I can't say the experience was great, had a few issues getting windows up and running. Once we got that sorted the thing doesn't shut down automatically, you need to power off manually. Never seen that before but we went through every option in bios and couldn't fix it.

Also used gigabytes over the years for multiple builds and they used to die after a few years.

Maybe these are isolated cases??? It put me off trying Asrock or Gigabyte again so I stick with Asus.

 

[EsaT]

Back in the early 2000’s the computer company I worked for always purchased ASRock boards if possible. Owner was a real penny pincher.

The worst components I have ever seen. Failure rate was through the roof and they were just, well, cheap and nasty.

Quite a lots of motherboards of that time suffered from "capacitor plague" when Chinese cheap makers used stolen partial electrolyte formula with stabilizers missing.

 

[Rroff]

I miss DFI more, too bad they dropped their consumer motherboard line.

Yeah DFI really innovated - I had some great systems based around their boards (other than a nasty brick bug with the 975 board I had where changing a certain RAM setting would result in the board becoming permanently inoperable on next boot).

 

[kully1972]

Msi are the most reliable and have the best support.
Asus support is terrible in uk and gigabyte have given me continous boot loop errors and generally have poor bios support.

 

[Cita8]

* Sarcasm Alert *

No one has mentioned BioStar?

Ha!
Actually, I had a brilliant Biostar board circa 1999. Still got it along with many others, also in the loft away from her indoors “you don’t use that now, chuck it out”

Been Asus for last two. Good but I think my favourite board was a Gigabyte.
Who knows, seems like they aren’t ‘made like they used to be’

 

[Cita8]

Quite a lots of motherboards of that time suffered from "capacitor plague" when Chinese cheap makers used stolen partial electrolyte formula with stabilizers missing.

Oh yes that was it.
ASRock were the worst I reckon. The capacitors on every board burst within a year.
Willing to try them again and narrowed board choice to Extreme4 or MSI equivalent.

 

[HellDiverUK]

In decades of building PCs (first was an AMD K5), I've found most boards are decent enough, my go-to manufacturers are Asus primarily, and second Gigabyte. The last manufacturer I'd use would be AsRock as I've had the most DOAs with them - worst was an expensive workstation board, factory sealed with a mashed socket.

 

[MartinPrince]

Ah good to seem some good old names mentioned like Abit and DFI. I still have an old Abit IP35 PRo going strong and only gave away my DFI a few months back.

Asrock used to be shocking but they are one of my favourite board makers now. Any of the other usual suspects like Asus, Gigabyte and MSI will all do a good, reliable job nowadays though Gigabyte's UK support is generally better to experience should in the unlikely event you have a problem.

 

[chrcoluk]

yeah its a tough one.

I feel the low end and mid range boards from all manufacturers have been lacking love, a few sites have highlighted this to try and "encourage" the manufacturers to up their game, but their focus is on the top end boards as those are what get all the review coverage.

My asus z270 board which I got for mining I considered mid range, cost me £140, and had way less features (and included components) than my asus z87 board which cost me £105 new.

I switched to asrock for my current build, and feature wise for the £ it rips asus apart, however there is coil whine with c-states enabled and when the onboard LAN is busy as well. It also cannot handle full XMP range of speeds on the secondary dimm slots meaning slower ram speeds if using 4 sticks. However this board has top end power phase hardware, chokers etc. and its not asrock's top model. But still over £200 so a upper end board.

My opinion is build quality should be equal across range of boards in a product portfolio so e.g. a asus z370 prime £100 board should have same quality components as a asus z370 ROG £300 board and the extra cost should be on features not quality.

So for low end boards I got no idea sorry, as I am guessing all the manufacturers are building them with corners cut.

Another beef I have with motherboards is the policy now of boxing them up in unsealed boxes, so when you buy one you dont know if you buying a return which is been resold as brand new. Asus have this policy which means I will never buy an asus board again.